Collected Poems

by Chuck Guilford

How I Became a Coyote

I was not always a coyote like this. I was once a little boy with a mother and a father just like you, but I got hungry for another kind of food so I went away, away from the home of my father. I went alone.

Then I came to a newborn river where I bathed. The water was clear there and cold so I drank a little. A soft-eyed woman was bathing herself at a curl in the rapids, a beautiful one. She offered herself to me. This was in the mountains.

After that I became a hunter without a gun. In the summer I ate mostly roots and bugs. In the winter I ate other things, things I do not like to think of as food, and always I was cold.

One winter when I was out hunting around on the prairie, I saw his shadow. He’d been watching me all along from behind some stones. Now he came out, and he laughed and sniffed me over. I’m Coyote, he said. You think you are a hunter, but you have no gun. I can kill you if I want to. And he did.

It wasn’t bad. At least when I got up and looked around I wasn’t hungry anymore. Then Coyote said, Now you are dead like me. Now you are a coyote, too. You will never go hungry again, and you’ll never get fat.